We are told by Thomas Carlyle that at a late point in the French Revolution, on the 5th of October 1795, Napoleon issued orders to send into a Parisian crowd “a whiff of grapeshot,” the results of which were the killing of 1,400 persons, the defeat of the Royalist uprising, and a great leaping forward of the reputation and fame of the future dictator Napoleon I.

Julian Assange would doubtless be flattered by this comparison, yet I’ll note there’s something Napoleonic — in the grapeshot manner — about his chosen occupation of, as he’s put it, “crushing bastards.” The means of pursuing this work has been, as we all well know, the indiscriminate firing of hundreds of thousands of documents at a time into the public domain. Could he possibly have read all of them in advance, or even most of them? And, if not, may he then credibly claim that he understands both the character of his weapons and of his actual, as opposed to fantasized, targets? These are serious moral and political questions, not to be dodged by those engaged in political causes. I would hope, but don’t expect, that something along these lines has kept him awake at night.

Now is a good time, the man having put himself at the centre of a political stand-off involving Ecuador and Britain, to review the political character of his cause. His personal character has been ably pursued by, among others, John F. Burns — and so I’ll leave it to the reader to pursue this question elsewhere. As for the accusations issuing from Sweden, I will defer to the able deliberations of Guy Rundle, published late in 2010 by the Sydney Morning Herald. This leaves room for consideration his political work, specifically the claim he appears to make for himself that he is a fighter of bad people.

In his early days, Assange took from Horace’s Odes his hacker name Mendax, a Latin noun which may be translated to English as fraud, deceiver or dissembler (English derives mendacity from this Roman root). The term was applied by the poet to Hypermnestra, who “splendidly deceived” her father in order to spare Lynceus — a man who she’d been forced to marry but who refrained from imposing on her the conventional nuptial rights of this arrangement. In other words, a man who could take no for answer — in contrast to certain accusations levelled against Assange. But there is another passage from Horace’s Odes, a work saturated with moral reflection, which comes to mind at this occasion:

… death chases after the soldier who runs, and it won’t spare the cowardly back or the limbs, of peace-loving young men.

I doubt he is indeed under danger of the death penalty, as some assert, and it’s instead the futile effort to escape a fight he himself started that distinguishes Assange from the true political warrior. Having fashioned himself after the soldier, Assange has disclosed only his laziness in the business of figuring out and declaring just who his enemies really are, as well as the nature and object of his battle. This may explain the current absurdity of his situation, his little war having put him solidly in the camp of the Ecuador government — a good example of a regime keen on suppressing free-speech, bullying journalists, and otherwise crushing the Assanges resident within its borders. As for his bastards, can there be any doubt that he has American and British politicians uppermost in mind, rather than the thugs of the Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban. Perhaps this is unfair, but how can one even weigh the point, given that his mode of operation makes no distinctions of any kind? His politics are a succession of melodramas, every one of his public acts a case of bold and indiscriminate gesture.

We forget, or overlook, that at bottom he is a man with a website, and not a hero or a warrior or a journalist. It happens that I support his right to be a man with a website. But his politics are lazy and undisciplined, and for these reasons morally empty. It is telling that he now supplicates the very type of political leader a principled defender of free speech would oppose. This grapeshot warrior has never bothered to articulate and stand up for anything in particular, beyond his right to keep firing into the crowd.

National Post

Wayne K. Spear was born at Buffalo, New York and grew up in southern Ontario. He is a writer of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, and poetry and has worked in communications, health, and education. His next book is scheduled to be published in 2013 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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